In a lengthy “60 Minutes” interview, President Donald Trump made false and questionable claims about nuclear weapons testing, inflation and military strikes in the Caribbean Sea. He also repeated numerous misleading claims he has made before on a range of topics.
- Trump justified telling the Pentagon “to start testing” U.S. nuclear weapons by saying that “other countries are testing.” Russia recently tested two nuclear-capable weapons, but North Korea is the only country to do a nuclear weapon test explosion this century.
- Trump falsely claimed, “We don’t have inflation. It’s at 2%.” The Consumer Price Index was up 3% for the 12 months ending in September, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
- He also wrongly said that grocery prices are “going down.” The CPI for “food-at-home” increased by 1.4% from January to September.
- Trump claimed that every boat the U.S. military has blown up in the Caribbean Sea since early September “kills 25,000 Americans” with illegal drugs. With nine boat strikes, that would be well over the total U.S. drug overdose deaths in 2023 and 2024. The administration hasn’t provided details on the boats’ cargo.
- In talking about the reasons for the boat strikes, Trump repeated his unsupported claim that Venezuela emptied “their prisons” and “mental institutions” into the U.S. through illegal immigration. Experts, including in Venezuela, told us there’s no evidence for that.
The president touched on the Insurrection Act, ending wars, federal indictments, the autopen, aid to Ukraine and the 2020 election in making claims we have written about before.
CBS News posted an extended version of correspondent Norah O’Donnell’s interview with Trump that ran over an hour. A shorter version aired on the program on Nov. 2. The full transcript is also available.
Nuclear Weapons Testing
Trump defended recently ordering the Pentagon “to start testing our Nuclear Weapons” by claiming that the U.S. was the only nation not doing so.
“Because you have to see how they work,” Trump said, when O’Donnell asked why the testing would be necessary. “The reason I’m saying testing is because Russia announced that they were going to be doing a test. If you notice, North Korea’s testing constantly. Other countries are testing. We’re the only country that doesn’t test, and … I don’t want to be the only country that doesn’t test.”
But the Energy Department says its National Nuclear Security Administration already periodically tests the “safety, security, reliability, and effectiveness of America’s nuclear warheads” with “subcritical experiments” that don’t require explosive testing.
If Trump meant detonating test nuclear bombs, none of the nine countries with nuclear weapons has done so since North Korea in 2017, according to the Arms Control Association, a nonpartisan organization that provides analysis on national security issues. North Korea is not a signatory to the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which says nations that sign the pact agree “not to carry out any nuclear weapon test explosion or any other nuclear explosion.”
Trump said in the interview that some countries, such as China and Russia, do secret testing and “don’t talk about it.” But Robert Floyd, executive secretary of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization, said in an Oct. 30 statement that the CTBTO’s International Monitoring System “has successfully detected all six declared nuclear tests conducted this century,” which were all done by North Korea. No other nuclear power nation has done one since 1998, when India and Pakistan each conducted two tests.
President Bill Clinton signed the CTBT treaty on behalf of the U.S. in 1996, but Congress didn’t ratify it. The U.S. still has honored the moratorium and has not conducted such a test since 1992.
Russia, another signatory, and the nation with the most nuclear weapons, rescinded its ratification of the treaty in 2023. But it last conducted a similar nuclear test in 1990. When Trump said Russia had recently announced a test, he may have been referring to its testing of a nuclear-capable cruise missile and a nuclear-capable underwater drone. Neither is equivalent to testing an exploding nuclear bomb.
Before Trump’s taped interview aired, Chris Wright, secretary of the Department of Energy, which is responsible for managing the country’s nuclear weaponry, said on Nov. 2 that the U.S. would not be using test bombs, as Trump’s testing comments may suggest.
“I think the tests we’re talking about right now are system tests,” Wright said on Fox News’ “Sunday Briefing.” “These are not nuclear explosions. These are what we call noncritical explosions.” He said the department will be “testing all of the other parts of the nuclear weapon to make sure they deliver the appropriate geometry and they set up a nuclear explosion.”
Inflation
Trump made several false statements about inflation and consumer prices during the interview, including the claim that “we don’t have inflation. It’s at 2%.” The Consumer Price Index rose 3% year-over-year in September, up from the 2.9% increase in the 12-month period ending in August, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
When he was asked about recent high prices for groceries, the president said, “They went up under Biden. Right now they’re going down. … When I first took over, eggs were double, triple, quadruple what they were. This was because of Biden.” He added later, “Biden gave me the worst inflation rate in the history of our country.”
Trump did not inherit “the worst inflation rate” in U.S. history. The annualized inflation rate was below 3% for the six months before Trump returned to the White House, as we’ve written.
Inflation did rise substantially during the first half of President Joe Biden’s term, due partly to his American Rescue Plan, but largely because of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, as we’ve previously explained. But it was never the “worst” in history. For the 12-month period ending in June 2022, the CPI increased 9.1%. The worst inflation occurred after World War I, when the largest 12-month price increase was 23.7% from June 1919 to June 1920. Overall inflation reached 14.8% from March 1979 to March 1980, the economic period known as stagflation.
Trump’s claim that grocery prices are “going down” was also inaccurate. The CPI for “food-at-home” — products bought at a grocery store or supermarket — increased from January to September by 1.4%, and was up 2.7% from September 2024.
The price of eggs has fallen significantly since Trump took office, as the president said, dropping 29.6% from January to September. But as we’ve written, many economists said the primary cause for the increase in egg prices during Biden’s tenure was the avian influenza, which led to an egg shortage, as millions of hens were killed to reduce the virus’s spread.
Trump also said during the interview, “Energy is way down. You know, you’re going to have $2 gasoline very soon. Nobody could believe it. You were at $4, $5, $6, and even $7.”
The week Trump took office, the national average retail price of a gallon of gasoline was $3.11, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. It was $3.02 the week of Nov. 3.
Trump cherry-picked high prices from 2022, some in California. Gasoline prices reached a peak of $5 a gallon on average in mid-2022 nationally. In California, prices hit an average of $6.05 per gallon in May 2022, climbing to $7 in one county. The high prices that year were due primarily to a drop-off in global oil supply following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and a resurgence in demand as the world emerged from the pandemic.
We can’t say whether, as Trump claimed, we will have “$2 gasoline very soon.” The Energy Information Administration projected that gasoline prices will average $2.90 in 2026. Experts say global market factors determine the price of gasoline. U.S. presidents have little control over the price that consumers pay.
Military Action Concerning Venezuela
When asked about the U.S. military strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea and the growing military presence near Venezuela, Trump made the implausible claim that “every one of those boats kills 25,000 Americans. Every single boat that you see that’s shot down kills 25,000 on drugs and destroys families all over our country.”
Fifteen vessels have been hit by the military strikes since early September, nine of them in the Caribbean and the rest in the Pacific Ocean. U.S. overdose deaths totaled 105,007 in 2023 and declined to 79,383 last year, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics. So, the math doesn’t add up that each boat carrying drugs would’ve killed 25,000 Americans.
Trump could be referring to the number of potentially deadly doses of drugs on each boat, even though each lethal dose of a drug wouldn’t result in an overdose. (We wrote about such a claim from Attorney General Pam Bondi earlier this year.) While the administration has said these boats were operated by narco-terrorists carrying drugs, it hasn’t provided details on the boats’ cargo or the identities of the people killed.
After one strike in October, Trump said the “vessel was loaded up with mostly Fentanyl, and other illegal narcotics.” As we’ve explained, boats from Venezuela and Colombia are known to smuggle cocaine, not fentanyl, which is “primarily manufactured in foreign clandestine labs and smuggled into the United States through Mexico,” a fact sheet from the Drug Enforcement Administration says.
There were nearly 30,000 deaths from cocaine in the U.S. in 2023, a number that has been rising in recent years. Most of those overdoses also involved synthetic opioids, including fentanyl.
Trump has charged that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro controls the drug cartel operating in international waters, as he said after the first military strike on a boat in early September.
In the “60 Minutes” interview, O’Donnell asked Trump if the military action was about stopping drug trafficking or about ousting Maduro from power. Trump said it was “about many things” and repeated his unsupported claim that the country “allowed their prisons to be emptied into our country,” also saying that Venezuela “emptied their mental institutions and their insane asylums” into the U.S. through illegal immigration.
Trump made this claim over and over again during the 2024 campaign, saying that other countries did it as well. Immigration experts told us there’s no evidence for that. Trump has pointed to a drop in crime in Venezuela as support for his claim, but crime experts in the country told us the reasons for the decline had nothing to do with sending criminals to the U.S.
“We have no evidence that the Venezuelan government is emptying the prisons or mental hospitals to send them out of the country, whether to the USA or any other country,” Roberto Briceño-León, founder and director of the independent Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, told us.
O’Donnell asked Trump if the military action, including the deployment of the U.S.S. Gerald Ford aircraft carrier to the Caribbean, meant that the U.S. was “going to war against Venezuela?” Trump responded: “I doubt it. I don’t think so.”
Repeats
Insurrection Act. Trump said that if he wanted to, he could invoke the Insurrection Act to send military troops, including the Army or the Marines, into U.S. cities and “no judge can even challenge you on that.” The Insurrection Act provides an exception to a legal prohibition on using federal military as civilian law enforcement. But contrary to Trump’s claim, a governor could challenge the president’s action in court.
Joseph Nunn, a counsel in the Brennan Center for Justice’s liberty and national security program, wrote in an explainer on the act that the Supreme Court “has suggested that courts may step in if the president acts in bad faith, exceeds ‘a permitted range of honest judgment,’ makes an obvious mistake, or acts in a way manifestly unauthorized by law” and “that courts may still review the lawfulness of the military’s actions once deployed.”
Trump also distorted the facts in saying that “almost 50%” of presidents have used the Insurrection Act and that “recent ones have used it 28 times,” adding that it’s “been used routinely.” The act has been used for 30 crises, dating back to 1794 under George Washington, with more than half of these crises occurring before 1900, according to a list compiled by the Brennan Center for Justice. The most recent instance was in 1992, when the California governor asked President George H.W. Bush to send federal troops to assist with civil unrest that erupted in Los Angeles after white police officers charged for beating Rodney King, a Black motorist, were acquitted.
Bush also used the act in response to looting in the Virgin Islands after Hurricane Hugo in 1989. Before that, President Ronald Reagan invoked the act to quell a prison riot in a federal penitentiary in Atlanta in 1987, but, as was the case for some other invocations of the act, the president did not end up deploying troops.
In the interview, Trump said he has chosen to not use the Insurrection Act “because I haven’t felt we need it.”
Ending wars. Trump repeatedly said that he “solved eight wars.” As we wrote when the claim was seven wars, experts in international relations said the president has had a significant role in ending fighting in four conflicts, though officials in one country (India) refute Trump’s claim. But some of the international disagreements Trump cites have not been wars, and some clashes have not ended.
For the eighth war, Trump is including the two-year-long war between Israel and Hamas. The two sides agreed to a ceasefire in early October and the return of hostages and prisoners. Many, including Biden’s former national security adviser, have said that Trump deserves credit for getting the deal done.
Steven A. Cook, a CFR senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies, wrote that this first phase “is significant,” though challenges remain in implementing Trump’s 20-point peace plan. “Whether this leads to an end to the war remains an open question,” Cook said.
Indictments: O’Donnell cited the recent indictments of former FBI Director James Comey, former National Security Adviser John Bolton and New York Attorney General Letitia James — “all public figures who have publicly denounced you” — and asked Trump if their indictments were “political retribution.” “Did you instruct the Department of Justice to go after them?” O’Donnell asked. Trump responded, “No, and not in any way, shape or form.”
But in a Sept. 20 post on Truth Social, apparently addressed to Attorney General Pam Bondi, Trump cited social media posts calling for the prosecution of Comey, James and Sen. Adam Schiff. “They’re all guilty as hell,” Trump’s post said, adding, “We can’t delay any longer … JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”
Comey was indicted five days later on Sept. 25 on charges of lying to Congress. James was indicted on Oct. 9 on charges of mortgage fraud. And Bolton was indicted on Oct. 16 for mishandling classified national defense information obtained during his tenure in the first Trump administration. As we wrote, some legal analysts have said that the government appears to have a strong case against Bolton – more so than it does against Comey or James.
Immigrant murderers. Trump claimed there were “over 11,000 murderers released into our country.” He has been citing variations of this figure for more than a year. But as we have written, he’s referring to noncitizens convicted of murder who were not being detained by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The list, known as the agency’s non-detained docket, included 13,099 people as of July 21, 2024. The “vast majority” of them entered the country prior to the Biden administration and had their custody status determined “long before this Administration,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement last year, noting that many were in prison. Also, the noncitizens include those who entered the country legally, such as green-card holders.
Trump also claimed that “50%” of the 11,000 “have murdered more than one person.” We don’t know the source of that claim.
Autopen. “He illegally used, as you know, a machine, the autopen in order to give pardons to people,” Trump said of Biden. As we have written, White House lawyers during the George W. Bush administration said the use of an autopen is perfectly legal, and constitutional scholars say that nothing in the Constitution even requires pardons to be signed.
As we noted then, pardons would be invalid if any pardons were signed by a staffer without Biden’s knowledge or consent. Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee issued a 91-page report on Oct. 28 alleging that “there was, in fact, a cover-up of the president’s cognitive decline and that there is no record demonstrating President Biden himself made all of the executive decisions that were attributed to him.” But it offered no solid proof that Biden didn’t authorize the pardons. In a July 10 interview, Biden told the New York Times that he “made every single one” of the clemency decisions, including those signed via autopen. And those who claim Biden’s aides used the autopen without his authorization are “liars,” Biden said.
Trump indictments. “You’re looking at a man who was indicted many times, and I had to beat the rap,” Trump said. “Otherwise I couldn’t have run for president.” Trump has mixed up the order. He didn’t beat the rap, thereby enabling him to run for president; winning the presidency allowed him to immediately beat the rap.
Trump was indicted in June 2023 for mishandling classified national defense documents after he left office. A Trump-appointed judge dismissed the indictment in July 2024, based on the Trump legal team’s motion that Jack Smith, the special counsel who obtained the indictment against Trump, was unlawfully appointed without congressional approval. After Trump won the election in November, Smith filed a motion to drop his appeal of the judge’s dismissal based on the Justice Department’s legal interpretation that the Constitution does not allow a sitting president to be prosecuted.
Trump was also indicted in August 2023 over his attempts to remain in office after losing the 2020 presidential election. Smith filed a motion on Nov. 25, 2024, to dismiss those indictment charges, again saying the Constitution does not allow for the prosecution of a sitting president. But Smith stood behind the investigation and the charges. The prohibition against criminal prosecution of a sitting president “is categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the Government’s proof, or the merits of the prosecution, which the Government stands fully behind,” Smith wrote in his motion.
Iran’s nuclear capability. O’Donnell asked Trump if he was convinced that Iran has no capability to produce a nuclear weapon since the U.S. air strikes in June. The president responded that “they have no nuclear capability, no.” But arms control experts have said Iran’s three nuclear enrichment sites targeted in the attacks were severely damaged but not completely destroyed, as we’ve written.
“It is also now quite clear that the Iranians, in anticipation of the U.S. attack, removed” a stockpile of more than 400 kilograms of uranium “enriched to 60%,” as well as other equipment from at least one of the nuclear sites, Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a nonpartisan organization that provides analysis on national security issues, told us in June. “This is the material that could be further enriched to bomb grade (90%) and provide enough raw material for about 10 nuclear devices; which would according to U.S. intel before the strikes take another 1-2 years to fashion into warheads small and light enough to be delivered via a ballistic missile.”
Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told the Associated Press in October that “nuclear material enriched at 60% is still in Iran,” and recent satellite imagery has shown renewed activity around Iran’s nuclear sites.
‘Rigged’ election. Five times in the interview Trump claimed the 2020 election he lost to Biden was “rigged.” But as we have written repeatedly, there is no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election.
Trump’s election challenges were almost universally dismissed by judges. And Trump’s own Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency concluded that the 2020 election “was the most secure in American history” and that there was “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
William Barr, who served as the U.S. attorney general under Trump, told a House committee in testimony released June 13, 2022: “In my opinion then, and my opinion now, is that the election was not stolen by fraud, and I haven’t seen anything since the election that changes my mind on that.” Barr told the committee the election fraud narrative the Trump campaign was “shoveling out to the public … was bullshit.”
Ukraine aid. Trump claimed, as he has numerous times in the past, “Joe Biden gave $350 billion to Ukraine, including a lot of weapons, a tremendous amount of weapons.” But as we wrote in August, Trump’s figure is much too high.
An August report from the special inspector general overseeing U.S. support for Ukraine said more than $187 billion was made available through June for military operations and the broader response to Russia’s invasion since February 2022. As we’ve written, about $174.2 billion of that was approved in five bipartisan appropriation bills, according to the Congressional Research Service. In addition, the U.S. provided to Ukraine a $20 billion loan to be repaid with proceeds from frozen Russian assets.
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